The Collector of Dying Breaths

Chapter 44

“Oh goodness, I’m so glad it was you. I was taking a walk and heard voices and thought you were intruders.” Melinoe put the small silver pistol back in her pocket. “What were you doing?”

Jac quickly lied: “We were examining the stones for some kind of carvings or impressions. Just trying to date the folly.”

Jac watched Melinoe assess what she’d told her. The woman took little at face value, but there was no reason for her to doubt Jac. What she was saying made sense. Besides, what else would they be doing? No one knew about the crypt. In fact no one knew the folly, fancilly built to look like a ruin, was a true ruin of a real chapel.

“We’re going to have drinks soon. Would you like to join us for dinner, Griffin?”

As they all walked back to the château, Jac thought that over drinks would be a good time to tell Melinoe what Griffin had learned. While they were all together having a glass of wine, she’d explain there was no reason to continue on with the experiment now that they’d learned the breaths were lethal.

At the house Jac excused herself to freshen up, and as she headed toward the stairs, she heard Melinoe offer Griffin the opportunity to visit the wine cellar and pick out a bottle from the collection.

When Jac returned fifteen minutes later, there was no sign of them. She headed toward the cellar.

“Griffin? Melinoe?”

There was no answer. She saw the laboratory door was open and walked in. Empty also. She took a moment to check on the formula she wouldn’t need to finish now. It smelled wonderful. Ancient and rich. She imagined what adding the ambergris to it would do. How it would round it out. For a moment she regretted that she’d never smell the final composition.

The cellar was large, and she walked its perimeter, thinking Melinoe was showing Griffin some corner even Jac hadn’t seen. Or that they were bent over a dusty bottle of Bordeaux. But then why wouldn’t they have answered?

She made her way back upstairs and to the living room, where Serge mixed cocktails every evening at six PM.

He was there lighting a fire and looked up when he saw Jac. His face was pale.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He nodded, but it was halfhearted.

From behind, she heard Melinoe enter the room. She’d changed for dinner, and her pink silk sheath rustled as her high-heeled shoes clicked on the marble floor when she crossed the room.

“I need you to make sure everything is secure,” Melinoe said to Serge.

He nodded and left.

“Where’s Griffin?” Jac asked.

“All in good time,” Melinoe said.

Spinning around, Jac tried to identify what she was smelling. It was the scent of fear. It had come from Serge. Something was wrong. Jac was certain of it. Instantly cold shivers of panic took over her body.

“Where is Griffin?”

“Jac, I need you to finish what you came here to start.”

“Where’s Griffin?”

“Doing a little banking for me.”

“What does that mean?”

“He’s my security deposit on the formula. When you complete it, you and he can leave.”

“What are you talking about? Where is he?”

“This house has secrets you haven’t found yet. Yes, there’s René’s laboratory. And the crypt. Those are your discoveries. But you haven’t stumbled on the charming medieval dungeon. They had them in the Middle Ages, you know. Very elaborate ones. Ours is the size of a bedroom. With all sorts of medieval wonders. Would you like to see?”

Jac knew that Melinoe was eccentric and dangerous. Why hadn’t she realized how foolhardy it was to stay here? She knew the answer. Jac had wanted the elixir as badly as Melinoe. And now? What had Melinoe done?

“Is Griffin there?”

“Insurance that you’ll finish what you started.”

“Why wouldn’t I? You don’t have to threaten me or hurt Griffin-I’ll finish the formula,” Jac lied.

Melinoe stood. “Correctly? Or you’ll corrupt it?” She walked to the door. “Aren’t you coming? Don’t you want to see where Griffin is?”

As Jac followed Melinoe, she watched the light reflecting off the silver heels on the other woman’s suede boots. It was something to do to keep herself from screaming. There was no reason to panic yet. This was just some strange game Melinoe was playing.

They walked through the first floor to the kitchen into a pantry where Jac had not yet been. Off that was a hallway.

“This was where the kitchen staff lived,” Melinoe was saying as if it were a normal evening and she was showing her house off. “The rooms were small, but at least they were warm-all of them have small fireplaces.”

The dialogue was ridiculous.

“And here we have the staircase that led to the cold storage below.”

Like the steps to the wine cellar, these were narrow and not easy to navigate.

One flight down and it was chilly. A second flight down and it was cold. They must have been on the north side of the house, where the sun heated the stones the least.

“In olden times, food was kept down here because of the natural chill, which they exaggerated by building thick walls.

“Now through here…” Melinoe opened a thick wooden door that creaked as the hinges moved. “We believe this part of the château dates back to the mid-twelfth century, before the current building was erected. This cellar was part of an older structure replaced by the château in the fifteenth century. As was the custom, the builders followed the previous footprint, even utilizing the old foundation.”

A short hallway ended at a rusted iron gate. There was a key in the lock, but the gate was open. Beyond it was another staircase.

Jac held back. She smelled something foul.

“Come,” Melinoe said, grabbing Jac by the arm, fingers digging into her flesh. “We’re almost there. Just one more flight.”

Jac descended the staircase. For some reason she found herself counting the steps. There were sixteen of them. She was freezing now. Her teeth were chattering. A combination of cold and fear.

At the bottom of the stairs was a second gate. This one was closed. Behind it was a circular room ensconced in darkness until Melinoe swung her battery-operated lantern on a small section of it.

Jac gasped.

She was looking at a medieval Judas chair-triangular-shaped with a very pointed tip that impaled and either rectally or vaginally raped the victim forced to sit on it.

Melinoe swung the light to illuminate a different section of the torture chamber. Here was another chair, this one covered with spikes. Once you sat down, the pinpoints penetrated your flesh-all over your back, arms, legs-left there long enough, you’d bleed to death.

Melinoe revealed another corner, and Jac saw a head crusher-used mostly to extract confessions. A horrific, inhuman device.

Then the light moved again, illuminating a wooden stockade similar to what witch hunters had used in Salem. Griffin’s head and hands were coming through center and side holes. There was a gag in his mouth, which seemed redundant. They were so far underground, Jac couldn’t imagine his screaming could have been heard by anyone upstairs.

“This is crazy!” Jac felt for her cell phone-then remembered it was in the bedroom charging. But even if she’d had it, there would be no signal this deep underground.

What was she going to do?

“Please understand, I don’t have any interest in hurting your friend. Just finish what you started and complete the formula. Once you have, I’ll release the locks and both of you can leave of your own free will.”

“The formula is useless. The breaths are poisonous!” Jac cried. “Let Griffin go.”

“You have no proof that the breaths are poisonous.”

“We do. My brother died from an ancient toxin. He must have inhaled the breath by accident when he broke the bottle-”

“Your brother was visiting laboratories and asking chemists to make up synthetic ingredients. Whatever poison killed him must have been something he commissioned. There’s no proof it was from one of my bottles.”

Jac couldn’t take her eyes off Griffin. “You can’t do this!”

“I don’t have a choice. I know you are planning to leave, and I can’t let that happen. I’d finish the formula myself, but I’m not an expert and we don’t have enough of the ancient ingredients for me to make a mistake. I need you. I have no choice, so you have no choice.”

Melinoe wasn’t sane. There would be no reasoning with her.

Across the room, Griffin looked at Jac and shook his head, no. He always knew what she was thinking almost before she did. From his expression she knew he had zeroed in on the thought that had hit her so hard she’d gone weak and almost fallen.

They had not broken the karmic circle after all. Griffin was going to die, and it would be because of her. Because Jac had involved him in this madness. It was her fault again.

She’d thought about this over and over for the last two years. She had loved this one man without reason and without hesitation since she was seventeen years old. Through her own crises and losses, through years of never speaking to him or knowing where he was. When she wasn’t with him she felt she was only half a person, in limbo. When she was with him, she was complete in a way that embarrassed her. In a way that a woman with a career and friends and family and success is not supposed to feel. She was tied to him. At some distant point in time, their souls had imprinted on each other and they’d never been able to cut the threads of fate that connected them.

Death had only separated them from each other for a time.

And now here they were. Playing out the same scenario. Jac was tied to Griffin. And that bond had been his death sentence over and over again.

It would end now.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes,” in a flat voice. “I’ll finish the formula,” she added, knowing that she might be signing her own death sentence if the experiment went wrong. “But you have to let Griffin go.”

“It’s almost been twenty-four hours. We’ll have dinner and then you can complete what you began. And then when I have what I brought you here for, you and Griffin will be free to leave.”